Bending Chicano Identity and Experience in Arturo Islas's Early Borderland Short Stories

Year 2000, Issue: 12, 51 - 58, 01.10.2000

Frederick Luis Aldama

Abstract

Since the hard-won publication of his novel The Rain God in 1984, the late Arturo Islas has secured a central place in Chicano/a letters today. Of course, there is much more to Islas as a writer than The Rain God. There are his other novels: the darkly lyrical borderscapedMigrant Souls and his posthumously published rapid-fire caló-narrated, urban-set La Mollie and the King of Tears. There are his short stories and poems collected and edited by myself in the Arte Público Press published volume, Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works, 2003 that use style and narrative technique to play with linear time and to fictionalize storyworld spaces that texture a complex array of Chicano/a identity and experience. Though Islas's visibility as a central figure in Chicano/a letters was delayed because of the deep-seated prejudices in the New York publishing circles--The Rain God met thirty-plus rejections based on its "too ethnic" content--his sense of himself as a border-themed, Chicano writer dates to his days as an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 1950s. See also Frederick Aldama's Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas, UC Press. Islas turned from a career as a neurosurgeon to commit himself to writing about the experiences of Chicanos/as learning to negotiate borders between nations, races, genders--even sexualities.

References

• Aldama, Frederick Luis. Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works. Houston: Arte Público Press, forthcoming, 2003.
• -----. Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas, Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming.
• Islas, Arturo. The Rain God. A Desert Tale. Palo Alto, California: Alexandrian Press, 1984.
• -----. Migrant Souls. New York: Morrow, 1990.
• -----. La Mollie and the King of Tears. (Edited with foreword by Paul Skenazy). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.
• Limón, José. American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.